15 Khordad

15 Khordad was a wave of demonstrations in Iran that occurred from 5 to 6 June 1963 when the supporters of the imprisoned cleric Ruhollah Khomeini rose up against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's government. Khomeini was arrested after accusing Pahlavi of spreading moral corruption and being an agent of the United States and Israel, and his supporters reacted with uprisings in Qom, Tehran, Shiraz, Mashhad, and Varamin. General Gholam Ali Oveissi was ordered to crush the uprisings, with tanks and soldiers in combat gear being ordered to "shoot to kill". In Tehran, hundreds of villagers from Pishva were dispersed by the army, with the death toll ranging from the tens to the hundreds. Police files claimed that 320 people were arrested and 380 were killed or wounded, although the latter did not include wounded people who avoided hospitals out of fear of arrest, and also did not take into account those who had been buried by the police. The uprising was one of the first instances of an anti-Shahist and Islamist uprising in Iran, and it is celebrated by the people of Iran, who would carry out the Iranian Revolution in 1978 to avenge the martyrs of 15 Khordad.